After the death of two-year-old Alan Kurdi and Canada’s decision to welcome 25,000 Syrian refugees, awareness of refugees in Canada seems to be at an all-time high.

Even so, Calgary’s Centre for Newcomers is holding an event Monday afternoon in honour of World Refugee Day as part of its first month-long citywide awareness campaign and celebrate how refugees have contributed to Canada over the decades.

“We’d like to go into a deeper discussion, and a deeper dive and hopefully get more of the community interested in volunteering and participating and paying attention to what’s going on in the world,” said Anila Lee Yuen, chief executive officer of the Centre for Newcomers.

The Centre helped more than 2,000 refugees who resettled in Calgary during the 2015-2016 fiscal year.

The Syrian refugees are just the latest of many large groups of refugees, including Hungarians in the 1950s and Vietnamese boat people in the 1970s and 1980s, who have resettled in Canada, integrated well and given back to Canadian society, she said.

“If we go way back to when Canada was first being started, from that time on, we have had many, many Mennonites that have gone on to do very well,” Yuen said.

“Through the Mennonite Central Committee, they have created their own charity to be able to bring in more refugees,” she added. “At the federal government level, we have (Democratic Institutions) Minister Maryam Monsef, who herself came to Canada as a refugee from Afghanistan.”

Every year, the Centre for Newcomers helps many non-Syrian refugees settle in Calgary, including Eritreans, Iraqis, and Colombians, due to “harsh realities that lead people to leave their homes and their countries,” Yuen said.

A UN report released Monday found that the number of people, including refugees and those displaced by conflicts within their country, was at a record high of more than 65 million people by the end of 2015.

This evening, the Centre for Newcomers is holding a World Refugee Day celebration at 4 p.m. at the Calgary Marlborough Community Association that is open to the public.

Refugees from Eritrea, as well as Alberta Minister of Culture and Tourism Ricardo Miranda, are among the speakers who will address the crowd.

Two photo exhibitions about global migration — “People on the Move: the Human Face of Migration” from the Mennonite Central Committee and the “Together” exhibition by the Aga Khan Foundation — will also be on display.

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